Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World

"Sure. So this book does get a bit crunchy, a bit difficult to chew on in places. It’s a work by a neuroscientist, written for the general public. Nina Kraus highlights some great starting points for somebody approaching this field. One of them is the extraordinary resolution and speed with which we hear. Auditory neurons, the cells in the brain that are processing sound from the ears, make calculations within thousandths of a second. And this gives us the ability to discriminate—to get a resolution on sound much greater than we have with images. Our brains are just extraordinary at processing sound. That’s just a starting point—one way to think about the miracle of hearing. We are all familiar with these funny looking dimpled flaps on the sides of our heads, these ‘pinnae’. And we may know about the eardrum, and the very small bones behind it that vibrate, and a little snail-like organ called the cochlea. Inside it are tiny hairs in there, which move in the liquid inside. So that’s hearing, but of course it’s only part of it. There is also a lot that goes on in the brain. There are around 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and a huge significant proportion of them—far more than you might think—are allocated to normal hearing. It’s an incredibly complex process with feedback and feed-forward. We don’t just hear sounds, we deeply engage with them. And this book is a great place to start, although it is a bit of a hard read in places. I’d also recommend Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are by Jennifer Groh. This book, which goes beyond hearing to the other senses, is very clear in its approach. Groh is very good on hearing and the profound connections between hearing and moving. They have a common evolutionary origin. The ears arose from organs designed to perceive gravity and find an organism’s place in space, with the goal of achieving movement. Yes, you pick up enormous amounts of information. We process that all the time. It’s actually amazing that humans can walk and chew gum at the same time! But, seriously, we tend to underestimate hearing. Writing my book has been an enriching process, and I appreciate this a lot more."